The Final Fantasy Syndrome: Fire Emblem Awakening Rises from the Ashes

Gods! According to this bit of news, Fire Emblem: Awakening was going to be the last game in the franchise had they not sold over 250,000 copies. Nintendo said that they were going to pull the plug on the series because of the decline in sales in its past few releases. This prompted Intelligent Systems (developer of the Fire Emblem series) to throw everything they’ve got into creating a supreme Fire Emblem game, which we totally experienced in Fire Emblem: Awakening.

The game was said to have all the best features of all Fire Emblem games rolled into one – which resulted to having the marriage feature that led to spawns (omg Batman pls), among other things. Casual Mode has greatly helped in how the game was received positively by the public “considering how valuable time is to gamers, Casual Mode came about to avoid causing them to lose this time. If we made them waste two hours playing because one of the characters fell in the field of battle, it would not be received well nowadays,” said Hitoshi Yamagami of Nintendo.

While I am new to the Fire Emblem series, I have played the game in its normal version where characters die permanently if they fall in the battlefield as I am a veteran of the strategy RPG genre, but I totally understand why the casual mode helped other players to ease in to the series. The game isn’t exactly a walk in the park, even for experienced players, so I am sure this helped in acquiring new fans. And who knows, they might be up for the challenge to play the normal mode after they have finished their casual trek to see what the fuss is all about. I am just glad that the franchise is not dead yet, and we might see a bigger and better game in Shin Megami Tensei x Fire Emblem coming out for the Wii U (hopefully to also get localized; let us now offer virgin blood to Jack Frost for this to happen).